


take the town out of the girl

by Rabbitt



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other, POV Second Person, Rape/Non-con Elements, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:53:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5159354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbitt/pseuds/Rabbitt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So what’s your damage, baby?” Evi asks you, your head resting on the soft plane of her stomach.</p>
<p>“Me?” You smile up at her. “I’m perfect.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	take the town out of the girl

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted over on tumblr - I'm rabbittrabbitt there, come on over and say hi if you like - but I was moving some stuff around and well, here we are. There's still more I want to do with this - how Duke and Nathan's relationship is different here, how Duke and Jordan's relationship is almost but not quite the same - but for now, here it is.

(Twelve things that never happened to Duke Crocker)

**1.**

Your daddy has been in the ground for eight months when the flyers for little league start cropping up all over town. You are nine years old, and you can do this math: baseball practice is twice a week for ninety minutes, plus games, and that’s a lot of time to have a good reason to be out of your mom’s house.

You know what drawer in your dad’s old toolbox still holds his well-worn baseball mitt. The lock isn’t even hard to break.

You show up on Saturday morning with your hair under a too-big ball cap and a too-big glove on your fist. Nathan is there with his dad, but he’s not talking to you, hasn’t been talking to you since you peppered his back with thumbtacks and let the blood soak through his shirt in front of Carla Rose.

The coach looks at you uncomfortably. “Sweetheart,” he says. “This is _boys’_ little league.”

You can feel your cheeks get hot under your ball cap. You should’ve seen this coming. You should have. You scowl up at the coach, fingernails digging into the leather inside your baseball mitt.

There’s a rustle of movement and then Nathan’s dad is there. He doesn’t rest his hand on your shoulder, but he stands beside you like he might and you fidget, throat tight.

“Hang on, now,” the Chief says. “I don’t see what the harm in letting the girl try-out is, Leonard.”

“Either she doesn’t make it and you don’t have to worry, or she does,” he continues when the coach starts to protest, shrugging, “and you got yourself a player.”

Eight years from now he will catch you sliding out of his son’s window with a look of disgust on his face, twenty years from now he will slap handcuffs on your wrists with his own gruff hands, and your chest will burn and burn and burn with resentment that he ever did this thing for you, the gratefulness you will never stop fucking feeling will crawl up into your throat until you _choke on it_.

“All right,” the coach says, finally, still looking at you warily and disbelieving, like you’re a wild bird that has flown in through his window.

You sit next to Nathan in the dug-out, knocking your knee against his until he hisses at you, _“Cut it out,”_ and satisfaction twists in your empty stomach.

When it’s your turn up to bat you square up on the plate, just like you watched everyone else do. You don’t have any gloves and the rubber of the bat sticks to your palms. The sun is hot on your neck, the smell of the red dirt of the diamond thick in your nose.

You miss the first pitch.

“Strike one!” the umpire calls behind you. You shuffle your keds in the dirt. Squeeze your fingers around the bat until it hurts.

You miss the second pitch.

“Striiiiike two.”

You tug your dad’s ball cap down. Square your shoulders. The coach smiles at you, ball in hand, _tough luck, girlie_ , and throws the last pitch.

There’s a crack that throbs down the length of the bat hard enough to make your wrists sting and you follow through, body twisting, and the ball goes sailing into the blue sky: going, going, gone.

The soles of your sneakers slide as you run for first, lungs burning, legs burning, and you think you can hear Nathan shouting your name behind you, _go, Dutch, run!_ and you’re going.

Going.

Gone.

**2.**

In this world you are born underweight and with your mother’s eyes (just like Duke Crocker is born into his world). This time, though, your father holds you warily in his arms. He does not light a cigar.

“They said it was gonna be a boy,” he says to your mother, still lying exhausted on the hospital bed, sweat drying on her skin. She offers him a shrug, face turned away.

“What am I supposed to do with a girl?” he asks, peering down at you.

Years later when your brother comes back into town after you (don’t) die, you’ll wonder at the math. Did _born in Haven_ equal out _she’s just a girl_ , was that enough to make your daddy leave you a ship full of secrets? Was it your mother’s eyes, was it the way you did everything he ever asked, fetched him six packs from the corner store that would hand them off to a seven-year-old without question, was it the way you dragged Nathan through the snow with his broken arm while Wade trembled and cried? Maybe it was generation after generation of Crocker men fighting against the mysterious woman who came to town every twenty-seven years, and losing. Maybe your father looked down at you in his arms and thought,

_fire with fire._

**3.**

You fish Audrey Parker out of the harbour and you make her coffee and you make her dinner and you don’t fall in love with her. You are smarter than this. You don’t have too many rules but _straight girls_ and _cops_ are two of them. Audrey Parker is a disaster waiting to happen to you, a nuclear bomb to set off in your own heart, mutually assured destruction, if you’re that stupid.

Audrey Parker who smiles with dimples, Audrey Parker who stitches together people’s tragedies until they’re whole enough to save them, Audrey Parker who is terribly, obviously in love with Nathan, Audrey Parker who cons you into killing and never apologises, Audrey Parker who digs at you like you’re a coal mine and dynamite-blasts you into something halfway approaching a decent human being, who makes you care, Audrey Parker who would hold you in her hands like you were a gun if you gave her half the chance.

You are not this stupid.

(You are.)

(In every world, you are.)

**4.**

This town has a nose on it better than a bloodhound. It can smell the queer on you a mile off.

You grow up spending more time in worn jeans and your daddy’s old shirts than dresses or your mother’s heels. Nathan Wuornos takes Hannah Driscoll to prom and that same night you kiss Carla Rose in the high school dugout, slide your hands up under the pretty satin dress she wore to the dance no one invited you to, fit your fingers around the curve of her thighs. You get called _dyke_ and _slut_ and _bitch_ , usually, you find, because of who you _won’t_ sleep with, and if this were any other town they’d call you _trouble._

By the time you’re eighteen you figure this town is going to kill you, although that’s probably not going to be the reason why. Either way, you want out. This is a land for hunters, after all, six-point stags skinned and stuffed and mounted on every wall, and you know if they ever got their hands on you…

You meet Evidence Ryan in a bar in Barcelona, the light glinting on her teeth and fingernails and catching like gold in her hair, holding her calimocho over her head as she dances. You think _oh shit_ and _oh god_ and _oh yes._

“So what’s your damage, baby?” Evi asks you, your head resting on the soft plane of her stomach.

“Me?” you say, smiling up at her, sliding down between her thighs. “I’m perfect.”

You sail halfway around the world with her and learn to know the shape of her body under your fingers the way you know how to tie a hitch knot, the shape of her name on your tongue the way you know the taste of saltwater. _Girls like us,_ she says, _if we want anything, we have to take it_. You have 400,000 dollars worth of stolen merchandise in your hold one night and nothing the next. Evi lies like she breathes, to marks, to strangers, to you, and you _love her_. In Bangkok she convinces everyone you’re an actual duchess and in Mumbai she says _fuck it, you and me are moving up in this world, this time you’ll be a princess._ She dresses you up in pearls and silk and strips herself bare on sandy beaches to lie under the sun, grinning up at you. 

“Hey, Crocker,” she says to you one night in Amsterdam. “You should marry me.”

When she leaves she takes everything in your wallet, a crate of illegally imported absinthe, and your favourite knit cardigan. She doesn’t leave a note. Three months later you get a postcard from Surabaya that only says _XOXOXOXOXOXOXO._

**5.**

Two months shy of your thirteenth birthday, your mother rolls back into town. She’s been gone for nearly three weeks this time. Long enough for you to start wondering, while you’re scraping peanut butter out of the jar for dinner every night, what you’re going to do if she doesn’t come back.

She’s mostly-sober and single, having left her latest boyfriend, Paul, back in Baltimore. Or he left her, and that’s why she came back. Either way, it’s good.

You didn’t like Paul.

“Baby girl,” she says, and she’s been hitting the whisky tonight but nothing harder. “Come here. There’s something I want to show you.”

She leads you into her bedroom, where the air is stale and smells like smoke and bleach, over to the vanity in the corner, the dusty mirror. She guides you into sitting with a hand on your narrow shoulder.

“Here,” she says, and then she shows you: this is how you put on foundation, eyeliner, lipstick. she does up your face, lips red, eyes smoky. Her hand is very steady and her words are slurred but careful, like this is the most important thing she has to teach you. “My mama showed me how when I was about your age. Gotta know how to make yourself pretty, pretty girl.”

She runs her fingers through your hair. You stare at yourself in the mirror.

“Pretty girl,” she says again, still stroking her fingers through your dark, tangled hair. “Boys are just gonna eat you up.”

**6.**

The moment you realise Jennifer is flinching from you because of what Wade did, you know you’re going to kill him. With your bare hands. It’s nothing to do with the high of troubled blood on your skin - and you are your mother’s daughter - but you will tear him apart and nothing and no one is going to stop you. She flinches from you and your heart _breaks._

Jennifer only flinches from you once and offers you a hundred sweet smiles to even it out, but it’s not enough. You look at the curl of her red lipstick and you think, _oh, girl, get out of here while you can. This town is going to chew you up and spit you out._ What you mean is: _you_ are going to chew her up and spit her out. Jennifer is the sun and you are a solar eclipse, always have been. You are hard lines and sharp edges and Jennifer says to you, cheeks pink, _I’ve never really known anyone like you before_ , and she isn’t soft, there is steel in her spine, but you know if you let her get anywhere near you she’ll only end up cut.)

(But you are selfish, you are.)

(You always are.)

You find Jordan Mckee’s body weighed down in the water. When you find your brother, you give him a chance to explain.

“What did you do to the girls, Wade?” you ask him, hands trembling.

He doesn’t answer. You don’t give him a second chance.

**7.**

You are sixteen. There are sixty dollars in your pocket and a foul taste in your mouth. You spend half the money on whisky because what does it matter, anyway?

(This is a lie, this happens every time.)

(This happens every fucking time.)

**8.**

In this life you don’t have any photos of babies you can never hold saved on your phone, will never give up a daughter that will kill you if you don’t. But you are fourteen years old and curled on the bathroom tile, forehead resting on the cold ceramic of the tub, you are twenty-three years old and huddled in a truck stop bathroom stall, you are thirty-four and tired, tired, tired, waiting for a little stick to tell you if your life’s about to be more fucked than it is.

You are never going to be a mother. You are never going to be your mother.

You’ve known for most of your life that your body is a weapon: throw a punch, fire a gun, smile. and you’ve known for nearly as long that it’s a double-edged sword, that it will probably be the death of you.

**9.**

Your ex-boyfriend sells you his bar for twenty bucks because he doesn’t have any other options, packs up his dead brother’s things and his wife and gets the hell out of Haven. For the first time in your life you own real estate, your own slice of dry land, and you almost pull anchor and run. What you do instead is fall in love with it, this place of your own, Audrey on the second floor and booze all around you and the waterfront right out the back door.

“Sweetheart,” and the man has to be a tourist, the locals mostly know better by now. But he clearly doesn’t know anything, he reaches out clumsily for your hand as you slide a beer across the bar. Before he can touch you an enormous hand wraps around his wrist, dragging him back.

“Think it’s about time you went home,” Dwight Hendrickson says flatly. His other hand curls around the back of the tourist’s neck. You sigh.

The drunk tourist splutters, protesting, and Dwight gives him a light shake, like a dog with a rat.

“I am actually capable of throwing people out of my own bar,” you point out when Dwight comes back from escorting him out. “And when I do it, I make sure they actually _pay me first_.”

Dwight has the grace to look sheepish. You roll your eyes. You’ve spent most of your life trying to get men to take you seriously, even with a gun in your hands. At least with Dwight you can be certain if it comes down to it, you’ll hit your target.

When you turn around to pull the vodka off the bottom shelf, you can feel his eyes on you, tracking the bulge of the handgun in your waistband.

“Well, Sasquatch,” you say as you turn back, smiling. “What can _I_ do for _you_?”

**10.**

Your entire life, Nathan Wuornos will never - not once - hit you. Press a gun to your head with a tattoo that says he can kill you if he wants, yank you around with a hand fisted in your shirt, manhandle you with a grip he can never tell is too strong, sure. But never use his fists on you.

(Which is funny, because Duke Crocker never - not once - flinches from him, but somedays, you do.)

“So what are you and Nathan, anyway?” Audrey asks once, when she’s only been in Haven a few days.

You smile with all of your teeth. “High school sweethearts.”

**11.**

You spend your whole life trying to defend yourself but nowadays you are all underbelly, offering up the soft parts of yourself to whoever wants them, and you let Mara sink her teeth into you.

(This is true of all worlds)

_Sweetheart_ , Mara calls you, pulling her lips back at the end of the word until she’s snarling. Mara calls you _beautiful_ , calls you _dangerous_ , calls you _such a soft heart underneath it all, that’s the problem with you tough girls, isn’t it?_

_I’m not Nathan,_ you tell her, crooking a finger in her chains, _and I’m sure as shit not William, I’m not gonna come in here thinking with my dick_ and _you want to play this game, Mara? I know this game, I know this game_ and you pour the both of you whiskeys and tell her about your mother and ask her _so what’s your damage, Mara? Did mommy not love you quite enough? Did daddy love you too much?_

And none of it matters, you still let her bring you down like a whitetail. Easy prey.

Mara paints your nails and fucks you on the rug and leaves handprints tattooed on your skin and tells you, _I kind of love you, Dutch Crocker _while you load up the seaplane to take both of you to your deaths.__

__“You know,” she says to you on the phone, after she’s sent you her own severed toe as a souvenir. She sighs. “I’m almost disappointed. I thought it’d be harder.”_ _

__(You are not broken. You were not broken when you were sixteen and diving into the ocean with skinned knees and a whisky bottle still clutched in your hand, you were not broken when you were nine, twelve, twenty-three, thirty-four. You don't think you are made of things that can be broken.)_ _

__(There is no world where you are made of things that can be broken.)_ _

“Yeah,” you say, and you think, _you've made me into a bomb and baby, I'm gonna blow._ “Well. What can I say. I’m easy.” 

__**12.** _ _

___The Rouge_ has been docked in the harbour for three days before Garland Wuornos comes to see you. His boots clunk loudly on the deck. You don’t move from your spot, heels resting on a spare chair, braiding your hair over your shoulder._ _

__“Duchess Crocker,” he says, resting one hand on his holster. “Thought we’d seen the last of you.”_ _

__You once left Haven like a dog in a trap chewing off its own leg, but here you are. Your daddy’s body is buried in this soil. Your blood is in this water._ _

__You smile._ _

__“Well, Chief,” you say. “You know how it is. There’s no place like home.”_ _


End file.
